The Orphic Gazelle: A Critical Iconology of the Zoomorphic Trope in Franz Marc and Rainer Maria Rilke

Abstract

The article explores the curious landing of the gazelle in Franz Marc’s pictorial text (1913) and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem (1907). An analysis of the iconographic and pictorial apparatus sets the foundations for a comparison to the poetic restitution of the same zoomorphic trope. Concepts from Visual Studies and recent iconological-anthropological schools of thought support a hypothesis of migration across time and medium of the gazelle’s symbolism and iconicity. Further, the critical iconology method reveals the possibility of autonomous expression for the zoomorphic trope in the idiosyncrasy produced by her torsion and gaze direction. Consequently, the gazelle offers a new path for decoding a precise historical and artistic attitude beyond expressionist pantheism. The implications of her alienating Orphic gaze are clarified when considered in contextual works and concern the visual projection towards a necessary turning point regarding Rilke’s and Marc’s ontological-aesthetic position. Beyond traditional symbolism, the gazelle depicts a transition toward formal experimentalism in the face of the impending First World War. It outlines the capacity of animal physicality to describe its genesis. Moreover, it illustrates the modern attitudes held towards culturally constructed change by distancing herself from hermeneutic overwriting while moving between precise ontological-aesthetic coordinates.

1. An Intuition of Shared Iconicity

Poets and painters of European modernism have long resorted to the zoomorphic trope of the gazelle in their hermeneutic discourse. Nevertheless, critics are yet to overcome traditional iconographic and iconological perspectives regarding this. Indeed, although comparative analyses including Franz Marc’s Blue Horses and Mary Olivier’s poetic rewriting do emphasise the power of “transmedial visual-verbal interdependence” (Ullyatt 2018, p. 2), the trope of the gazelle is yet to receive the proper investigation that it truly warrants. Therefore, this article will draw on Visual Studies to implement theoretical paradigms that can shed light on the trope from a novel critical perspective.

In recent years, contemporary perceptions of iconology—as identified by Barbara Baert (Baert et al. 2012, p. 17)—and the theoretical foundations proposed by William John Thomas Mitchell1 and Lars Elleström (Elleström 2016) have revealed a different representation of the gazelle to the imagination, which uncovers an existing dialogue between Franz Marc’s painting titled Gazelles and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Gazelle. The zoomorphic trope prompts a profound reflection on a modern subject provided with aspirations of world knowledge and communication. Furthermore, it permits the reader to escape the dangerous perpetuation of hermeneutic violence against herself. Consistent with this visual suggestion, the analysis proceeds by resisting a reduction of the zoomorphic trope to a mere projection of human sensibility in the face of linguistic impotence (Hoffmann 2017, p. 119).

As a result, the analysis departs from a comparative iconographic approach to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic composition and Franz Marc’s painting2 (Driscoll 2014) and instead advocates a new iconic perspective. Recent contributions by Kari Driscoll (Driscoll 2014, p. 81), Eva Hoffmann (Hoffmann 2017), Daniel Dahlstrom3, Tony Ullyatt4, Claudia Ohlschlager5, Eberhard Jürgen Wormer (Wormer 2005), Luke Fischer (Fischer 2013), and Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy (Klingsöhr-Leroy 2022) are deployed to identify similarities in the literal and symbolical meanings embedded in the figure of this animal. This article compares Franz Marc’s painting and Rilke’s poem6 with the early twentieth-century avant-garde landscape. Their contemporary production endows the gazelle with a legitimate self-reflexive value and shows the shared iconicity that lies under the redundancy of the motif. A new symbolic conception of the visual trope (Hariman and Lucaites 2008, pp. 48–61; Skrzypulec 2021; Mariane 2018, p. 336; Elkins et al. 2021, pp. 67, 69, 70) allows a fusion between subjective interiority and the objective world, and prompts us to reflect beyond outward similarities that do not necessarily imply comparable levels of iconicity (Elleström 2016). Consequently, this article will present a novel comparison between the two artists, one that I hope will yield a connection deeper than both authors’ overt relationship to pantheism and partial adherence to expressionism (Fischer 2013). The comparative analysis will truly restore the relation between the image in the absence of a trustful language and human feelings, and will draw on new visual theories to showcase the oriental and exotic components shared by their sensibilities. The analysis will give voice to the portrayed gazelle, her speaking pose, and the depth of her gaze. Embracing an ever-widening contextual space, it will cross the threshold of traditional symbolism to discover a new alienating visual detail related to the animal. Consistent with this intention, Mitchell’s meta-image and interdisciplinary approach (Mitchell 2018, p. 18) will be applied.7

I will locate a new gaze in the image. It is possible, indeed, to look beyond the close adherence to the New Objectivity model and register the emerging tendency to the chromatic constructivism of the later Cézanne8. Both compositional patterns accompany the transition during which Rainer Maria Rilke composed the Gazelle in 1907 and included it in the New Poems. The glance of the animal becomes a metaphor for the necessary confrontation between past and present. Indeed, it is not facing a time yet to come; it is looking backwards into the past. This visual contrast between her pose and gaze identifies a prelude to a new Orphic intention that unites the poet and the painter. The gazelle perches on the threshold between being the object or subject of its mortal destiny. It embraces a purpose that Robert Delaunay and his study of light spread on the avant-garde scene from 1912. Rilke transfers this purpose onto the cycle of Sonnets to Orpheus, exploring a latency of the image through elaboration that surpasses the historical-literary premises.

Unconsciously, the gazelle looks back, like Orpheus. The revelation on the poetic page opposes the semiotic value of the animal’s pose and gaze, enhancing the contrast between the trope and the lyrical and visual fabric in which it is embedded. This raises questions: Should analysis and interpretation be solely based on the position of composition and painting? Should the fact that Rodin is the dominant model for Rilke’s poetic phase ending in 1907 prevent taking further hermeneutic possibilities into account? Should Franz Marc’s painting only be interpreted in light of powerful expressionist chromatism?

I consider the hypothesis of a medial migration of the visual trope and claim that the gazelle may already anticipate through her figural restitution the Orphic form to which both artists would later tend. It suggests an intimate and universal rarefied atmosphere, which brings a necessary confrontation with death. Moreover, the Rilkean animal inaugurates a sharp dialogue comprising her innermost fears and the search for the courage to pronounce the Nietzschean saying yes to life (Nietzsche 2006, p. 179) when coming to terms with Heideggerian openness (Dahlstrom 2013, pp. 373–75). Hence, I will investigate how the gazelle marks a decisive turning point for Marc and Rilke, one that indicates a substantial shift in their attitude toward both the object of their art and toward themselves as artists.

2. A Critical Approach to the Investigation of the Hermeneutic Gazelle Construction

Paradigms related to Visual Studies and critical iconology supported by Mitchell and his predecessor9 will be applied to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Gazelle and Franz Marc’s Gazelles. The desire to extend the methodological boundaries renders the image an autonomous agent, enabling it to manipulate the pictorial and poetic space. While implementing a comparative (Mitchell 1994, p. 85) and interdisciplinary approach to identify a formal and thematic variation on this zoomorphic trope, challenging idiosyncrasies of its modern nature will be explored as further hermeneutic sceneries and visual anticipation of the human within a fluid10 textuality. Much attention will be drawn to the hermeneutic construction in which visual contradictions trace connections (Baert et al. 2012, p. 163) between the gaze of the gazelle and that of others.

3. A Visual Trope between Unchanging Consistency and Formal Variation

Marc’s and Rilke’s gazelles fit into the critical framework of intertextuality (Elkins 2008, p. 14)11. As visual sign systems, these zoomorphic tropes can lose consistency within the same vision and find reciprocity in the dialogical relationship with some external factors. Therefore, it is interesting to focus on the thematic variation (Mitchell 1994, p. 6) between the two. Implementing a critical iconology broadens the interpretative discourse to a literary and artistic historical context and activates semiotic connections that often remain in the margins of scholarly reflection. Corporeality and gaze show a semiotic drift (Mitchell 2018, p. 34) and mark a tacit purpose to subsume poetic and pictorial elements under the same expressive category (Mitchell 2018, pp. 5–7). Eye and pose form a difference on paper that makes previously neglected details remarkable in light of a different visual signification (Ivi, p. xii).

Critical iconology (Ivi, p. 8) explains how this inter artes migration of the gazelle also implies a stepping out of time. A narrative crystallises in the zoomorphic image and reveals its intrinsic meaning (Mitchell 1994, p. 26), which is both inevitably inscribed in a historical constellation and capable of speaking to us independently (Watt and D’Alleva 2021, pp. 25–28). While emphasising the implications of what the image offers to the gaze, we should face the gazelle’s symbolic revelation to the Rilkean Open (Dahlstrom 2013, pp. 374–75). By analytically comparing the Gazelle painted by Franz Marc in 1913 and its Rilkean literary counterpart12, critical iconology decodes and searches for the rhetoric in their co-presence, highlighting a fascinating dialectical meaning produced by shared internal oppositions13.

This approach outlines the gazelle’s self-reflexive character in a synthetic and immediate form. It is inevitable to encounter the enigmatic Gazelle when setting out the iconographic analysis of Franz Marc’s painting. As an open image accommodating unexpected hermeneutic intuitions (Elkins 2008, p. 92), the connotative threefold projection of the motif releases a tension between Marc’s vision and the object described a few years earlier in the Rilkean poetic text. Its dynamic and symbolic chromatic juxtaposition shows a peculiar enunciative structure to early twentieth-century modernist painting.

Beyond the established use of the zoomorphic trope in German modernist poetry and the reconceptualisation of language through this interlocutor, the perceptual moment deserves renewed attention14. This is to embrace the idea of an animal gaze that seeks the open future and the struggle of a modern aesthetic to represent its sensibility (Mitchell 2005, p. 44)15.

As our mental framework appears culturally encoded16, a critical approach of this kind is convincing. Particular interest lies in the variety and legitimacy of the questions arising from this conceptual combination of iconographic and visual analysis. Interrogatives concerning the quality of the dialogue with the image could be interpreted in the refined sensitivity as part of a universal decoding process. Imagination and recollection are intertwined with the self-identity that the image places at the mercy of the beholder.

Does the gazelle, as a zoomorphic trope, refer forcibly to the stage of artistic production in which it is placed? Exotic and oriental components of the thought pervade Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Franz Marc’s realisation of it (Wormer 2005). With conspicuous chromatic power in one hand and an unparalleled compositional virtuosity in the other, we are led to integrate the already identified cultural specificity of the gazelle symbol (Gal 2022), garnering new values (Kjeldsen 2015, p. 127) to determine the message it seeks to convey.

The gazelle embodies the painterly search for a pantheistic fusion between subject and background17 and the immersion in the organic rhythm of nature. Powerful colour combinations follow in the footsteps of Orphism, for which Delaunay paved the way. Such chromatic texture is decisive in rendering the dynamism that characterises the Gazelle and gives rise to her triplication. Distortions including her triple representation suggest a soft and harmonious fusion of the subject with the increasingly abstract background (Fischer 2013).

However, this compositional structure also indicates a triple movement discovered by a single gazelle. An elliptical motion starts precisely from the figure located furthest back and—in a counter-clockwise motion—reaches the one found in the front, passing through the intermediate projection18. As such, the pose and gaze of the gazelle strike the eye ahead of the choreography performed by the figure as a whole. The torsion describes a backward trajectory of the gaze, while the subject appears to be fixated on something that it passed just moments ago. Located in an indefinable, open space in which rich vegetation offers itself to the sky, a vague and ambiguous orange component in the background balances sharply painted natural details. This might be interpreted as the frame of a building and, thus, a reference to the coexistence of nature with human civilisation. The yellow-blue codification (Wormer 2005) implies a desire to create a coexistence of the feminine and masculine.

In Middle Eastern countries, the animal’s slender and agile body traditionally reflects maternal characteristics like femininity and fertility. Vigilant on canvas, the motif draws the difference19, standing out against the background through the concrete, painterly operation of making it visible, with which the observer interacts imaginatively. A combined process of setting a boundary to the zoomorphic identity and going beyond it takes place, and highlights the making of the form in space.

Franz Marc depicts the animal’s effort to assert its ego and establish a balance between past and present. He illustrates the dynamics of seeing and being seen (Mitchell 2018, pp. 8–13). On the formal level, his Gazelle entails the effective coexistence of curved and broken lines. They are oblique and appear thicker, where the play of light and shadow is inserted into the formal texture to emphasise the gradual nature of the subject’s movement. The chromatic modulation plays along with the sharpest contrast. It features the tension accompanying the action (Mitchell 1994, p. 27), the emotionality of a gazelle that warns of the impending danger while standing out against the ethereal and vanishing background. And yet the animal looks back.

The interaction between the figure and polychrome scenery restores harmony. Nonetheless, the light penetrates the canvas front-on, as if indicating the act of being in sight, the waning of superb and overbearing expressionism at the dawn of a new-born tendency that instead whispers agitation concerning the new stylistic dominance (Mitchell 2018, p. 15). The gazelle’s posture further expresses this desire to experiment. A vivid bodily rotation emerges from the two-dimensionality to which the pictorial canvas condemns the subject. The coexistence of realistic solidity and momentary fragility bears the full scope of raw emotion to which the possibilities of life subject both the animal and the observer. Intertwined lines visually depict the problematic emergence of the animal identity, coming to terms with her past. The pictorial restitution of the body torsion confers rhythm and symmetry to the canvas, in which elliptical trajectories ultimately converge in the central figure.

The gazelle expresses comfort through the grace, elegance, and acceptance of its archetypal feminine values, combining these with the determination needed to cope with the impending global conflict. Indeed, Franz Marc painted Gazelles in 1913, a date that indicates a possible conscious sanctioning of a turning point in his oeuvre. In 1909, his everyday life on horseback in the Bavarian countryside influenced his pictorial language and expressive technique. The brutal reality that was soon to unfold determined the compositional choices in the painting, while in Weidende Pferde I (1910)20, Marc voluntarily respects the mimetic criterion in the bodily restitution of the animals and places figure and landscape within the same rhythmic flow of time.

The gazelle imposes itself with an iconic difference21 and comes to terms with what is both authentic and compelling. It is the first animal in the zoomorphic sequence created by Franz Marc between 1909 and 1914, which can face the era’s fragile and vanishing reality with courage. The atmosphere appears differently again in contemporary paintings such as Blaues Pferd I, in which the horse inhabits a fantastical world defined by strong colour juxtapositions22 and simple formal combinations. Yet it is interested in crossing medial boundaries, as the Orphic Gazelle succeeds.

The gazelle overcomes the nostalgia expressed by the biblical pose of the blue horse painted in 1911. Yet it differs from the gigantic Tiger. Carved in stone, the tiger stands out between luminous crystals on a dark background. Franz Marc depicts the predator in a final, sculpture-like pose, despite the avant-garde atmosphere accompanying its birth23. A Delaunay-esque luminosity tempers her cubist texture. In this regard, the idea of a similar evolution to Rainer Maria Rilke’s recognises the transition from a sculptural panther to a gazelle. Marc resolves her two-dimensionality and completes it in the dialogical identity. The artist’s representation follows the autonomous interpretation of the visual subject. The introspective act of the gazelle comprises the perpetually ongoing process of decoding all symbolism it entails, thus adding new expressive values.

W. J. T. Mitchell’s critical iconology rediscovers the self-critical and reflexive24 character of this figurative imagery shaped by unique combinations of memory and fantasy. The fact that Franz Marc in 1913 and Rainer Maria Rilke in 1907 use the same visual trope becomes plausible in light of the pictorial turn (Mitchell 2018, p. 15) as a product not of similar historical contingencies, but of different and changing attitudes. Visual contrasts within the figures represent a symbolic balancing act between alertness and hope. They mark a threshold between one aesthetic model and the next. Idiosyncrasies within this intertextual reasoning framework inscribe in the zoomorphic figure a different turning point for the poet and painter. Such elements place the trope and its self-revealing identity at the centre, raising the question of how far hermeneutics move away from the symbolic value intrinsic to the image.

In Eastern iconography, the female gazelle is a recognized indicator of fertility during propitiatory rites in drought25. It moves nimbly and tirelessly with large, fiery eyes, aware of the danger to which it is constantly exposed. Furthermore, the animal is tenacious and accustomed to living in unfavourable conditions. It epitomises graceful femininity and is endowed with exceptional eyesight capable of saving her from predators. Upon the vastness and circularity of her stare26 lies a symbolic structure. The term “gazelle” repeatedly occurs in the poems that Federico Garcia Lorca dedicates to escape, to unforeseen love that we cannot see, and to individuals that we remember. The term suggests a reinterpretation of the pastoral song in a dramatic key (Piudik and García Lorca 2013). Whitman watches over the bodiless gazelle, perhaps struggling to affirm the existence of a purely metaphysical, vanishing love through poetry27. In 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke drew inspiration from the gardens of Paris as he imbued the animal with a fluidity that is an anthropological trait of modernity and anticipates the Orphic affirmation of life in the face of the danger it implies.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem emerges curiously during a particular stage in the development of his lyric poetry, as he observes a gazelle who does not run from threat but poses in the Jardin de Plantes. Far from the risk that nature predisposes, it marks the transition between Rodin’s Objectivity and the acceptance of objective realisation in the manner of Cézanne. Hence, the poem manifests as a mediation between sculptural definition and the chromatic constructivism that Rilke would admire a few months later at the Salon d’Automne28. Although he was yet to elaborate on the Orphic reflection manifesting in the dedicated collection of Sonnets to Orpheus, the figure nonetheless evokes this position towards the historical present.

The powerful legs of the gazelle are ready to sprint between mimetic naturalism and abstract thought, waiting for the moment that the listening neck gives the green light to move29. Instead, the poet imagines her figure in motion, as we see through references to her forehead and head (Rilke 2014, l. 4,12, p. 46), and through the admiration that Rilke lends to her backwards-facing gaze30 in the final verse. This detail is reinforced by the description in the two preceding verses, and cannot fail to evoke Cézanne’s splendid Bathers31.

Let us specify, then, what the gazelle—in and of itself—succeeds in communicating. It first takes an unexpected leap in time, before freezing her meaning, in what Benjamin refers to as the latency of the image (Weigel 2015, p. 351), and waiting to reappear in Franz Marc’s painting a few short years later, still sporting that same intrinsic ambiguity. Lightness and determination, fecundity and vigour, acceptance, and resistance feature the self-revealing zoomorphic trope in both pictorial and poetic text, but a formal variation deserves attention. In fact, it emerges on canvas as a figure set against an increasingly abstract and vanishing background, but as one who still displays an unchanging consistency. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, by contrast, her figure acquires plasticity in relation to that scenery. Thus, her forehead and gaze reflect the forest and the lake. Rodin is present, as is the expressive and aesthetic value given to the surface, on which appears the alienating detail. Far from its native savannah, the gaze of the gazelle is aware of the link between what has been and what will happen, like Orpheus departing the realm of the dead.

Apollonian Fronds and lyre grow from the forehead of the gazelle-like symbolic horns32. The poet foreshadows select imagery for the reader, as the words rest like petals on his eyes (Rilke 2014, ll. 6–9, p. 46). The incipit presents the Orphic aspiration of the enchanted form (Ibid., l. 1), which is powerfully displayed in the leaping in the animal’s hooves. Thus, this opening formula realises a stark contrast to the taxonomic subtitle (Hoffmann 2017, p. 126) and the observation of the mimetic criterion it suggests.

A sensitive identification into the figure of the gazelle occurs, as the object of vision becomes a subject provided with aspirations that shape time and space. A further ambiguity is embedded in the final passage, one that contains no explicit understanding of what nor who is projected onto the water. This emphasises the hermeneutic negotiation and invites the readers’ imagination, modulated between instinct and cultural framework (Ibid., pp. 128–38).

The reader perceives the gazelle as intimate, despite being distant and derived from an exotic imagination. Such a figure fascinates Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Marc, thus building bridges between the self and the emblem of otherness (Driscoll 2014, p. 81). Mirroring the act of reading itself, her backwards-looking gaze appears attractive because of its alienation of context (Klingsöhr-Leroy 2022, p. 14) and integration of the spatiotemporal axis of reality with that of memory and identity.

This is what Klingsöhr-Leroy points out when referring to factors that Rainer Maria Rilke had already brought to light through his poem Der Leser. One of the later Picassian paintings manifests the same state of dreamy splitting; it displays the emergence of the reduced self, which approaches another reality in its newfound openness to transformation33. The enchanted form of the gazelle transports us into a dreamlike world, just as the animal on Franz Marc’s canvas does for a moment, before returning to historical reality: the impending First World War. This way, Marc’s zoomorphic trope emphasises the disjunction between being and appearing, by natural and historic fact as an artistic element worthy of embrace. On the canvas, the Orphic sign draws new life from the past for a translation of the modern that does not hold the chromatic power of expressionism. Yet, the delicate whisper of change seeks dialogue with the observer like the rhyme that comes and goes with a docile nod of the head34.

4. Metamorphic Power of the Alienating Gaze

The comparative analysis of the poetic and pictorial texts yields the identification of a visual semiotic system that constitutes the foundations for a new reflection on the form. This methodology delved into a paradigmatic shift occurring within a naturalistic framework whose metamorphic power is rediscovered through a single metaphorical detail: the alienating gaze of the gazelle. Initially unbound by the author’s background, the figure of the gazelle challenges a bearer of meanings that interact with the beholder to reflect on the sociohistorical ground and the fluctuation of modernist reflection. The image foreshadowed a self-reflexive moment for Rainer Maria Rilke’s aesthetic evolution, whose Orphic turn officially took place much later in the collection of the Sonnets to Orpheus.

The analysis clarified how Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Franz Marc’s gazelle has become a visual metaphor for a discursive practice35 developed around the expressive instrument itself (Mitchell 2018, p. 18). Owing to its dialectical nature, the image oscillates between a previous aesthetic perception and a new formal horizon of the Dingwerdung36. Further, the gazelle’s Orphic character leads it to witness Rilke’s gradual rejection of sculptural and objective spatial definitions of being in favour of new permeability between background and figure. The correlation between Rilke’s poetic gazelle and that portrayed by Franz Marc draws attention to her being at the threshold, by looking for a new relationship between what is visible and what is not yet. A further contextual insight identified the pictorial gazelle as the place for a reversal, rooted in a release of the inner tension generated by shocking historical circumstances. Indeed, this internal tension sees the gazelle transcend the conscious configuration of past and present (Weigel 2015, p. 366). The interpretation of its triple representation too reveals a hidden longing for liberation from expressionist chromatic overbearingness. Its gesture reveals a willingness to stand out against the background and shape it with a different sensibility, gradually moving away from the expressionist rush of the chromatic combinations that characterize the landscape. The operation of subsuming poetic and pictorial frames under the same fluid expressive category led to featuring the zoomorphic trope as a meta-image embodying the self-reflexive moment of perception and visual conceptualisation in the avant-garde atmosphere.

The interdisciplinary approach outlined the spontaneous revelation of such a zoomorphic trope. The idiosyncrasy provided by the contradiction between the animal’s torsion and her backward gaze seems strikingly unusual for fleeing prey. Such naturalistic details led us to infer an Orphic evolution of thought. Unlike Rainer Maria Rilke’s Der Panther and Franz Marc’s Tiger, the Gazelle draws attention to the exotic abandonment of solidity and sculptural definition.

The interpretation focused on its interaction with the observer, who initially distances himself from the familiar and historical by looking at the gazelle rather than projecting his feelings onto her. Facing the author’s ability to produce meaning and the recipient’s ability to decipher it (Baert et al. 2012, p. 69), the formal reading of Franz Marc’s canvas pointed out that curved and broken lines give the animal subject an illusion of life. Vanishing nuances of the background allow the observer to place themselves freely within the painting, close to a future yet to be defined. Additionally, the analysis highlighted that the traditional curvilinear reading path from the bottom left to the top right of the canvas can vary when contemplating the rotation to which the zoomorphic instance is subjected. Such variation thus allows a consistent hermeneutic crystallisation37 with the visual semiotic system. Thus, a hermeneutic act occurs, deceiving itself in the instinct to decode and encode (Ivi, p. 83). It also involves the poetic text and compensates for its lack of plasticity by proceeding with figures of thought that engage the imagination in an autonomous exploration of the image (Ivi, p. 48).

5. Conclusions

This article borrowed methodological suggestions from Mitchell’s Visual Studies to explore the gazelle trope and compare its formal realisation on Franz Marc’s canvas and Rilke’s poetic expressions. Starting from the highest formal level, which has hierarchical control over the thematic one (Mitchell 1994, p. 27), our analysis identified an interesting variation on the theme and helps to determine the emotional and alienating effect that the work assumes.

We adopted an interdisciplinary approach (Elkins 2008, pp. 14, 36, 173) that rendered it possible to observe the two gazelles from a critical distance. Proceeded by differences between literature and visual art (Mitchell 1994, p. 6) in the search for a universal value immanent to the artwork and increased by its dialogical character, the binary viewpoint (Mitchell 1994, p. 9) whereby word and image constitute two autonomous systems was replaced with a dialectical and diegetic perspective (Fabbri 2019, p. 1). That is, analysis held the gazelle as a visual trope (Mitchell 2005, p. 10) charged with immanent and relational symbolic meaning.

As a pictorial surface—a porous skin (Mitchell 1994, p. 44) from which a soul’s sensitivity emerges—a poetic page attempts to carve itself in space and time and manifest its identity through the body’s narrative (Ivi, p. 26). Gestural cues, the direction of the gaze, and the significant contradiction between these elements give rise to interdisciplinary intentions belonging to the hallmarks of current humanistic studies (Elkins 2008, p. 14). The concept of the meta-image (Mitchell 1994, pp. 38, 42, 57) as an interweaving of expressive means, and as a symbol synthesising a much broader discursive practice by analogy (Elkins 2008, p. 19), was also yielded by the profile of a living gazelle, at once a verbal and visual trope (Mitchell 2005, p. 10; Roberts 2008, p. 52). It is a rhetorical figure of meaning, one that is syntactic under its role in organising pictorial, poetic, and thought space. Its twisting on the canvas and its Orphic oscillation between Apollonian and Dionysian on the Rilkean page create a vagueness that stimulates the human imagination (Leopardi 1998, pp. 38–42) and constitutes the beauty of the gazelle’s artistic gesture, leading us to reflect on the concept of visual literacy (Elkins 2008, pp. 92, 96, 102). An educated gaze (Elkins 2008, p. 13) led by formal dissonances and references to a necessary formal turn in the face of the impending war allowed us to touch it gently and participate in its inner dissension.

The analysis thus focused on the alienating effect given by the gaze of the two gazelles, the idiosyncrasy created by the contradiction realised between it, and the pose assumed by the animal. Beyond simplistic and reified distinctions (Roberts 2008, p. 7), the analysis aimed to highlight unexpected elements with respect to the texture of semiotic relations (Elkins 2008, p. 23) between the poetic and pictorial gazelle, the formal and intimate turning point expressed through the figurative capacity that characterises word and image.

The analysis has also enriched the iconism intrinsic to the verbal and pictorial medium (Fabbri 2019, p. 1) by exposing a further hermeneutic passage related to the narrative ductus that relates form to its absence (Roberts 2008, p. 1) by resting on the translatability (Liu 2023, p. 16) of expressive tools. The zoomorphic trope chosen by Rilke and Marc projects itself into a vision yet to be constructed and stimulates reflection on the process that leads to it. It directs the multimodal argumentation (Kjeldsen 2015, p. 117), leading it towards an awareness of the imperative shift towards an unexplored realm of transformation. It expresses the emotional journey of surpassing conventional medial limits and evokes resonances of the past, thereby refining the perception of a newfound expressive and transformative power under the semiotic stratification (Ivi, p. 127) that composes it. The visual trope of the gazelle appeared significant for its gradual detachment from the mimetic and natural environment, the steadfastness with which its body resists transience while maintaining a gaze anchored to its earthly, organic, inalienable feeling.

The idiosyncrasy identified in the combination of pose and gaze makes explicit the fear inherent in the historical moment, while the adherence to modern aesthetics is centred on the mediated extension (Hariman and Lucaites 2008, p. 54) of reality in a dialectical thought that takes its first steps towards abstraction. The analysis recognised in the gazelle a metaform (Mariane 2018, p. 336), a place for reflection on the expressive instrument. Specifically, it established a conceptual link between pictorial and poetic text based on the assumption of a structural commonality between the two artistic products. The analysis arrives at this not through a transposition of formal categories, but by searching for equivalent formal schemes that reinforce the conceptual link anchored to the visual trope (Renkema 2009, p. 69). In the gesture of the gazelle, a paradigm shift insinuates that it is subject to the rhetoric of the turning point. An iconic gravitation (Krešimir 2019, p. 177) draws upon the image of an animal, serving as a stable reference amid the ever-changing flow of existence. Through a juxtaposition of the gazelle’s poetic and pictorial portrayalse, we captured the assertion of its independent realm, becoming the focal point of introspection that extends into the observer’s mind.